I just listened to your joint episode of Speedway and Swan. At one key moment, I was sitting out in my backyard with the sun splashing me and the wind whipping through the shirts and pants and towels hanging on the line. I heard you, Brian, read a line from one of my poems about the difficulty of drawing wind, of writing wind, exactly at the moment that that same wind blew my underwear and socks to the grounds. And there was a shiver that traveled up my spine.

Maybe poems are signposts on a path out of the disaster all around us.

Maybe there is a way we accompany each other. These little things: these “maybes” and these “accompaniments.” There is something there, a land, that is not the word for it. There is something there, a land, that is not the map for it. There is a presence there, or an absence making itself known in a steady, constant hum. There it is again, that hum: among us, buzzing a quiet demand to be heard. Or maybe not demanding, maybe that hum in its presence / absence is an ask or maybe a constancy, ignorant of the wily ways of humans and the (anti)worlds they have wrought.

Maybe whiteness is a disease and maps are a symptom. Maybe symptoms can be beautiful things: a perfect cough, a delicate sniffle, the way a young child has to be taught to blow the mucus through a nose. Maybe a stomachache that reminds a mind to slow down or a headache that floors a body for an entire day.

Maybe there is no way out without two people, at the very least, two people, a holding of hands, a recital of words. Maybe it’s another day again and poems are a kind of solace for the symptoms

Hearing the two of you with words from one of my poems in your mouths, rattling around: now that made the sun a little brighter, the day so much more bearable and warm.